Politicians from 13 Legislatures
Rarely Engage with Researchers on Social Media

Sebastian Ramirez-Ruiz

Hertie School
seramirezruiz.github.io | seramirezruiz

Motivation

Research evidence can be valuable in informing and shaping policy decisions by equipping policymakers with necessary data and information to create and execute policies to address societal problems (e.g., Bavel et al. 2020; Berger et al. 2021; Geddes 2021)

The endeavor to understand how academic research insights are integrated into policymaking has a long tradition in the social sciences (Weiss 1979; Caplan 1979; Huberman 1994)

 

There is an apparent gap in this research.

Most of the narratives ignore the agency of policymakers in a crucial step… research evidence consumption.

  • There are challenges to measuring policymakers’ engagement with researchers and their research (implausibility of devising a behavioral measure in the past)
  • How could self-selection into research evidence fit into this?

I propose that digital traces from policymakers can provide valuable information to understand the nature of the evidence-policy nexus and contribute to the current knowledge base

Why digital traces from social media?

 

  • The structure of online social networks can be revealing of individual’s latent features (Barberá 2015; He and Tsvetkova 2023)
  • Social media environments are crucial for information diffusion. These media are increasingly important for political and scientific communication (Castanho Silva and Proksch 2022; Brainard 2022)
  • These platforms can offer behavioral measures under a unified set of rules. Users operate within the same frame of behaviors dictated by the platform and are embedded in a grander social network

Why evidence and legislators?

In addition to the executive and its public service, legislatures around the globe also take efforts to inject evidence into policymaking (Ouimet et al. 2023).

 

But also, the functions and activities of legislatures make it interesting.

  • Establish general frameworks: they draft, adopt, and amend laws under which the government develops public policies.
  • Oversight role: Question-and-answer (committee work, opposition).
  • Representative function: The link of citizens to the political system.

Materials and Methods

Geographical scope

 

The data consist of legislators from 13 legislatures across 12 countries.
  • Argentina: Senado de la Nación
  • Brazil: Senado Federal do Brasil
  • Canada: House of Commons
  • Colombia: Senado de la República
  • France: Assemblée nationale
  • Germany: Bundestag
  • Ireland: Dáil Éireann
  • Italy: Camera dei Deputati
  • Mexico: Senado de la República
  • Spain: Congreso de los Diputados
  • UK: House of Commons
  • USA: Senate and House of Representatives

Legislator data

I established a data collection pipeline to extract their friendship networks and a series of platform-specific behaviors. 90% of these legislators are on Twitter.
  • Snapshots of their following network
  • Tweets, retweets, and quotes
  • Likes

I collected roughly 3 million users and more than 30 million tweets.

Matching legislators with academic researchers

  • Extract Twitter entities from the Crossref Event Data dump
  • Extract author features from the papers linked from OpenAlex’s API
  • Map these features under a set of rules
  • Validate

I recover ≈413K unique researcher accounts from Twitter. In addition to, information about their research profile from OpenAlex (field of study, works, citations, etc.)

 

I map the researcher accounts onto the legislators’ Twitter data.

 

Preliminary Findings

Some things I find…

These legislators rarely follow research producers and engage with their content.

  • 11% of the legislators do not follow a single account from the academic researcher list
  • The academic research producers constitute a minuscule part of the legislators’ networks (on overage 1%) of the followed accounts
  • These statements also apply to the platform-specific behaviors
  • Only a fraction (6%) of the academic research accounts are part of the politician networks
  • A higher proportion of researchers in the social science and humanities concepts are followed by politicians compared to those in the natural sciences
  • Some legislator characteristics seem to matter

The distributions of these behaviors are highly skewed. But, the legislators in this space are very specific.

The distributions of these behaviors are highly skewed. But, the legislators in this space are very specific.

The distributions of these behaviors are highly skewed. But, the legislators in this space are very specific.

The distributions of these behaviors are highly skewed. But, the legislators in this space are very specific.

The distributions of these behaviors are highly skewed. But, the legislators in this space are very specific.

The distributions of these behaviors are highly skewed. But, the legislators in this space are very specific.

For the most part, they are scientists themselves

Ideological and party features

Across legislatures, these features seem to matter:
  • Politicians from parties with thin ideology, people sovereignty, and antielitism platforms linked to science-skepticism engage less (e.g., populist radical right)
  • Green politicians seem to be more embedded in these academic researcher networks on average

German Bundestag

How to think about these results?

How to think about these results?

Directions for Discussion

I would really appreciate your feedback

This is work-in-progress.

  • Do you have any suggestions for benchmarking?
  • Do you have any ideas for scaling ideological constructs across legislatures?
  • Do you know some data sources that map politicians’ academic backgrounds?
  • What type of framing would you envision around such paper?
  • Would you expect such paper to dive into a communication story too? (e.g., looking at the content)
  • Many more…

Thank you.

Bibliography

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Baekgaard, Martin, Julian Christensen, Casper Mondrup Dahlmann, Asbjørn Mathiasen, and Niels Bjørn Grund Petersen. 2019. “The Role of Evidence in Politics: Motivated Reasoning and Persuasion Among Politicians.” British Journal of Political Science 49 (3): 1117–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123417000084.
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